The weight of the name

By Paul Bourget

The automobile turned sharply about the chevet of Saint-François-Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to stop before one of the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still in motion when he jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within the church, to reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal, on Boulevard des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing characteristic of Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and thoughtful, which a proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly tawny veil of the mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes, of a caressing brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem could mean, but one thing,—the desire, to guard from curiosity and comments a clandestine rendezvous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Librorium Editions
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9782383835332

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PAUL BOURGET

Author of A Divorce, Pastels of Men, etc.

Translated from the French by

GEORGE BURNHAM IVES

1908

© 2022 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383835332

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

Landri

II. A Grand Seigneur

III. The Tragic Underside of a Grand

Existence

IV. The Tragic Underside of a Grand

Existence (Concluded)

V. In Uniform

VI. The Will

VII. All Save Honor

VIII. On a Scent

IX. Separation

X. Epilogue

THE WEIGHT OF

THE NAME

I

LANDRI

The automobile turned sharply about the chevet of Saint-François-Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to stop before one of the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still in motion when he jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within the church, to reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal, on Boulevard des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing characteristic of Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and thoughtful, which a proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly tawny veil of the mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes, of a caressing brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem could mean, but one thing,—the desire, to guard from curiosity and comments a clandestine rendezvous.

It was true, but—a circumstance which would have made the officers of the dragoon regiment in which the young count was serving as a lieutenant burst with laughter—he had this rendezvous with a woman with whom he was madly in love without having ever obtained anything from her. What do I say? He had not even ventured, except on one occasion, to speak to her of his sentiments.

How many elements in his life had conspired to make him a fop and blasé: that face and that profession, his fortune and his name—one of the best in France, which had lacked nothing but the éclat of great offices at court! But Landri was born romantic. He was still romantic at twenty-nine. In him, as in the hearts of all genuinely tender-hearted men, emotion neutralized vanity.

He had met Madame Olier in 1903. That was the name of the woman in question, a widow to-day, then the wife of one of his comrades. It was now 1906, so that he had loved her for three years. It had never entered his head that such perseverance in a dumb and unselfish devotion was a delusion. He thought so less than ever on this warm and, so to speak, languid morning of late November, as he went his way, drawn on, uplifted by a proximate hope.

Although he had reasons for very serious reflection, the air seemed light to him, his step was buoyant on the sidewalks of that ancient quarter, of which he recognized the most trivial features. Behind him the dome of the Invalides stamped the gold of its cupola on a pallid, pearl-gray mist. At his right the slender towers of Saint-François soared aloft in a transparent vapor. At his left the trees of a large private garden waved their almost leafless branches over the enclosing wall, and, as far as one could see, the populous Boulevard de Montparnasse stretched away, swarming with tramways and omnibuses, with cabs and drays.

In due time the young man turned into Rue Oudinot, then into Rue Monsieur. There he paused before a porte-cochère, the door of which, although it was ajar, he hesitated for some seconds to open. This door gave access to a courtyard, at whose farther end was hidden one of those dainty, oldish hôtels, pleasing to the eye, albeit out of style, of which that street with its ancien-régime name contained some half-score or more a quarter of a century since. Alas! they are vanishing one by one. As soon as the owner of one of them dies, the crowbars of the demolishers set to work. An aristocratic plaything of stone is razed to the ground. In its place rises one of those vulgar income-producing houses, on whose threshold one finds it difficult to imagine the lingering of such a lover as this. To be sure, it is simply prejudice. In the eyes of a man in love, the profile of his mistress, espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck with poesy and fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in brick and steel which the Americans brutally call sky-scrapers. All the same, there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue Monsieur. Never had he savored it more deeply than at this moment, when he was about to risk a step most important for the future of his love.

He had come to Valentine Olier's house with the firm determination to bring about a decisive interview between them, and to ask her for her hand. If he had insisted that she should receive him at a most unseasonable hour, he had had for that insistence imperative reasons which excused him beforehand for his indiscretion. His timidity before that day, and the rapid throbbing of his pulse as he finally crossed the courtyard, did not come from an embarrassment of the sort that can be explained. It was the sinking of the heart from excess of emotion, which accompanies over-powerful desire in untried sensibilities. Naturally refined, Landri had not aged himself prematurely by the abuse of precocious experiments. To this young man, who was really entitled to be so called, what awaited him behind the curtains of that ground floor was the happiness or the misery of his whole life. But, we repeat, he hoped.

His eyes feasted themselves, as their custom was, on the lines of that façade, so closely associated with the image of his Valentine. Ah! would she ever be his? A reflection of her person illuminated in his eyes that two-story building, charming in very truth, whose light pilasters, modest decorations, pediment with balustrades, and niches adorned with classic busts, presented a perfect specimen of the architecture of the time of Louis XVI,—a composite style, antique and pastoral, like that extraordinary epoch itself, in which a moribund society played at idyls—awaiting the tragedy—amid Pompeian architecture.

This hôtel had been the folly of one of the luxurious farmers-general of that day. To-day the petite maison, divided bourgeois-fashion into small apartments, numbered among its tenants, besides the officer's widow, a retired magistrate on the first floor, and on the second the head of a department in the ministry. Thus an elegant caprice, originally designed for the suppers of a rival of Grimod de la Reynière, found itself giving shelter to existences of quasi-cloistral regularity. How gratifying to Landri was Madame Olier's choice of a habitation so retired!

Left free and alone, at twenty-seven years, with an infant son, with no near relatives, having few kindred in the world and a modest fortune, Valentine had valued in that apartment the very thing that would have disgusted so many women,—the charm of oblivion, of silence and of meditation. On the other side the ground floor looked upon a very small garden, adjoining others much larger; and as the dividing wall was concealed beneath a cloak of ivy, that enclosure of a few square yards seemed like the corner of a park.

As he pressed the electric bell, Landri was sure that the only servant, answering the ring, would conduct him through the narrow reception-room and the salon with its covered furniture, to a tiny room, looking on the garden at the rear, which Madame Olier used as a second salon. She would be there, writing, at the little movable table which she placed by the fire or by the door-window according to the season. Or else she would be reading, seated on the bergère covered with an old striped stuff, dead pink and faded green, always the same. Or else her slender fingers would be busy with her embroidery needle. Correspondence, reading, work or music,—a piano which she rarely opened except when alone, told of that taste of hers,—her occupation would be constantly interrupted by a glance at the path in the garden, where her son Ludovic was playing. Landri found therein an image of what the whole life of that widow and mother had been during the year since she had lost her husband! Great God! how dearly he loved the young woman for having thus proved to him how justly he had placed her so far apart from all other women from the moment of their first meeting!

Valentine was there, in fact, in the small salon softly lighted by the morning sun which was just making its way through a last film of mist. She was apparently engrossed by an endless piece of embroidery. But the music portfolio, still open on the piano, and the stool pushed back a little way, might have betrayed to the young man how she had passed the time while awaiting his coming. Still another sign betokened her agitation. She had not her child with her. Contrary to her custom she had sent him out to walk at ten o'clock. Why, if not that she might be alone with her thoughts? Her self-control, however, enabled her to welcome her visitor with the same inclination of the head as usual, friendly yet reserved, the same smile of distant affability. At most the quivering of the eyelids betrayed a nervousness which was contradicted by the even tones of her voice and by the impenetrable glance of her limpid blue eyes.

Such women as she, with hair of a pale gold, almost wavy, with slender hands and feet, with a tapering figure, and dainty gestures, seem destined to allow their faintest impressions to appear on the surface, one judges them to be so vibrant and quivering. On the contrary, it is generally the case that no one can be more secretive than such creatures, all delicacy and all emotion as they are. Their very excess of nervousness becomes in them a source of strength. From their first experience of the world they comprehend to what degree the acuteness of their sensations renders them exceptional, solitary beings. By one of those instincts of self-defence which the moral nature possesses no less than the physical nature, they manœuvre so as to conceal their hearts, in order that life may not brutalize them. They become, as it were, ashamed of their emotions. They hold their peace, at first concerning the most profound of them, then concerning the most superficial. And thus they end by developing a power of external impassiveness which adds to their charm the attractive force of an enigma, especially as this intentional dualism, this constant watch upon themselves, this prolonged contrast between what they show and what they feel, between their real personality and avowed personality, does not fail to exert some influence even on their manner of feeling and thinking. They are capable of the nicest shades of discrimination, even to subtlety, when they are pure; and, if they are not pure, even to stratagem, for the fascination or the despair of the man who falls in love with them, according as he, in his turn, is very complex or very simple.

Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp was both, for reasons which were connected with the peculiar features of his destiny. Thus he had already suffered much through that woman, and still had owed to her the most delicious hours that his youth, darkened by an inborn and acquired melancholy, had ever known. The first words exchanged between him and Madame Olier will enable us to understand why, and at the same time what dangerous, almost unhuman, chimeras can suggest themselves to a scrupulous sentimental woman like Valentine, who loves love and fears it, who cannot determine either to deprive herself of an affection that is dear to her, or to sacrifice her self-esteem by abandoning herself to it, who becomes agitated without losing her head, and whose pulses throb without causing her to abdicate her reason.

But the hour had come to have done with all equivocation. The young man's mind was made up. The young woman had read it between the enigmatical lines of his letter. She read it in those eyes, whose glances she had so often dominated in the past three years, simply by her attitude. No earthly power would prevent Landri from speaking to-day. She knew it. She knew what words he would utter, and she was preparing to listen to them, and then to reply, perturbed to the inmost depths of her being, and outwardly so calm in her mourning garb. She was dressed as if to go out, in order to have a pretext for breaking off the visit at her pleasure. The black cloth and crêpe gave to her delicately hollowed cheeks an ivory-like pallor which made her even lovelier.

After the first words of commonplace courtesy, amid which she found a way to slip in an allusion to an errand to be done before luncheon, there ensued one of those intervals of dumbness that occur between two persons at the moment of uttering words which cannot be retracted, and which they crave and fear in equal measure. The crackling of the fire on the hearth, and the ticking of the clock, suddenly made themselves heard in that silence, which the officer broke at last, in a tone in which his emotion betrayed itself.

Doubtless you understood, madame, he began, that it was a very serious matter which made me presume to ask you to receive me at this hour. I had no other at my disposal. I must start for Saint-Mihiel to-morrow evening. I was able to obtain only a very short leave of absence. My father awaits me at Grandchamp, where he is hunting to-day, and you know how much importance he attaches to his hunt. I must be there before the end, or run the risk of disappointing him. I succeeded in catching the train at Commercy last night. I was at the Gare de l'Est at nine o'clock. In an hour and a half by automobile I shall be at Grandchamp. I tell you all this because—

Because you do not think me your friend, she interrupted, shaking her head. But I am, and most cordially. You have nothing to apologize for. You have accustomed me to a too loyal devotion, which I know to be too loyal, she repeated, for me not to divine that a very important motive dictated your letter. Tell me what it is very simply, as a friend, I say again, a true friend, who will answer in the same way.

She had assumed, as she said these few words, a very gentle but very firm expression. Her voice had dwelt with especial force on the word friend, which she repeated thrice. It was a reminder of a very hazardous and very fragile engagement. Thousands of such engagements have been entered into, since passionate men, like Landri, are able to respect those whom they love, and since women secretly enamored, like Valentine, dream of reconciling the emotions of a forbidden affection with the strict requirements of virtue. The rare thing is not that one suggests and the other accepts the romantic compact of friendship without other development, but that the compact is adhered to. Absolute, almost naïve sincerity on the part of both contracting parties is essential, a sincerity which excludes all trickery on his part, all coquetry on hers. There must also be a voluntary separation of their lives, which does not permit too frequent meetings. He who says sincerity does not always say truth. One may maintain sincerely a radically false situation, may obstinately abide by it through mute rebellions, through secret and long-protracted suffering, through hidden anguish, like that the memory of which quivered in the young man's reply:—

A friend! What bitterness those soft syllables assumed in passing through those suddenly contracted lips! I knew that, at the outset of our conversation, you would shelter yourself behind my promise. I knew that you would anticipate the sentences that I wish to say to you, and that you would not allow me to say them. God is my witness, and you, too, madame, are my witness, that I have done everything to maintain the absolute reserve which you imposed as a condition upon the relations between us.—Let me speak, I deserve that you should let me speak! he implored, at a gesture from Valentine, who had half risen. He put such mournful ardor into that entreaty, that she resumed her seat, without further attempt to arrest an avowal which her woman's tact had foreseen only too plainly during these last days. Accustomed as she was to control herself, her constantly increasing pallor, her more and more rapid breathing, disclosed the agitation aroused in her by the voice of him whom she had pretended to look upon only as a friend, and who continued: Yes, I deserve it. I have been so honest, so loyal in my determination to obey you! Anything, even that silence, was less painful to me than to lose you altogether. And then, I had given you such good reason! I have reproached myself so bitterly for that madness of a few minutes, three years ago! That I had confessed to you what I ought always to have hidden from you, since you were not free, crushed me with such profound remorse! Every day at Saint-Mihiel I pass the wall of the garden where that scene took place. Never without seeing you again, in my thoughts, as I saw you after that mad declaration, abruptly leaving me and going back to the house, without looking back. And what weeks those were that followed, when we met almost every day, and I did not exist for your glance! 'She will never, never forgive me,' I said to myself, and the thought tore my heart. I was sincere when I determined to exchange into another regiment, to leave Saint-Mihiel; sincere when I tried, before my departure, which I believed to be final, to speak with you once more. I felt that I must explain my action to you, must make you understand that no degrading thought of seduction had entered my mind, that I must have been demented, that I had never for one second ceased to have such unbounded esteem and respect for you! Ah! I shall be very old, very cold-blooded, when I am able to recall without tears—see, they are coming to my eyes now!—your face on that day, your eyes, the tone in which you said to me: 'I have forgotten everything. Give me your word that that moment of aberration shall never return, and I will see you as before. I do not wish your life to be turned topsy-turvy because of me.'—While you were speaking, I was saying to myself—that hour is so vivid to me!—I was saying to myself: 'To breathe the air that she breathes, to see her go to and fro, to continue to hear her voice, there is no price I will not pay.' And you marked out the programme of our relations in the future. You said that the world did not place much credit in a disinterested friendship between a man and a woman, but that you did believe in such a thing provided that both were really loyal. I could repeat, syllable for syllable, every word that you said that afternoon. I listened while you said them, with an utterly indescribable sensation, of assuagement and exaltation as well, through my whole being. It was as if I had seen your very soul think and feel. Yes, I solemnly promised you then that, if you would admit me once more to your intimacy, I would be that friend that you gave me leave to be, and nothing more. That promise I have the right to say again that I have kept. I declare that I would continue to keep it if the circumstances had remained the same. But they have changed. Ah! madame, if one could read another's heart, I would beseech you to look into mine. You would see there that at the news of the misfortune which befell you, I had no selfish reflection concerning that change. I thought only of your grief, your solitude, your orphan child. So long as the catastrophe was recent, I was ashamed even to glimpse a new horizon before me—before us. But I cannot prevent life from being life. At twenty-seven a woman is entitled to reconstruct her life without offending in any wise the memory of him who is no more. On my part, I am not breaking my plighted word when I say: 'Madame, the worship, the adoration that I had for you three years ago, and that you justly forbade me to express to you then, I still entertain. My silence regarding my sentiments since that time is a guarantee of their depth. I break it to-day, when you can listen to me without having the protestation of the most fervent, the most respectful, the most submissive of passions cause you remorse. What I said to you in the garden I say again to-day, adding to it an entreaty which you will not deny. I love you. Let me devote to you what I have left of youth, my whole life. Allow me to be a support in your solitude, a consolation in your melancholy, a second father to your son. Be my wife and I will bless this long trial, which justifies me in repeating to you what I felt on the first day that I met you,—but how could you have failed to suspect it?—I love you, and I never have loved, I never shall love, anybody but you.'

This impassioned harangue, so insistent and so direct, bore little resemblance to the one that Landri had prepared during the long waking hours of the night and in the cold light of dawn, while the express train of the Chemin de Fer de l'Est bore him away from the little garrison town where his destiny had caused him to meet Captain Olier and his charming wife. What diplomatic stages he had marked out for himself beforehand! And he had hurried through them all to go straight to that offer of marriage, put forth, abruptly, with the spontaneity that is more adroit than all the prudence in the world with a woman who loves,—and Valentine loved Landri. She loved him despite complexities upon which we must insist once again in order to avoid the illogical aspects of that woman's nature, loyal even in its subtleties, even to the slightest appearance of coquetry. She loved him, but in a strange ignorance of the elements of love, despite her marriage and maternity. Her union with a man older than herself, arranged by her family, had not caused her to know that total revolution of her existence, after which a woman is truly woman. With her, affection had never been anything more than imaginary. In the chaste and artless delights of this intimacy, without caresses or definite words, with a young man by whom nevertheless she knew that she was loved, and whom she loved, she had found the only pleasure which her sensibility, still altogether mental, could conceive. To tell the whole fact, she loved—and that friendship had sufficed for her! It was inevitable, therefore, that at the first attempt of her alleged friend to draw her into the ardent world of complete passion,—and this offer of marriage, under such conditions, was such an attempt,—she should throw herself almost violently back. She ought, however, to have foreseen it, that step which would put an end to the paradoxical and unreliable compromise of conscience devised by her between her conjugal duties and her secret love. Yes, she had foreseen it, and on the day after her husband's death. Her habit of reflection, intensified by the monotony of her semi-recluse existence, had led her to take an almost painful pleasure in a minute scrutiny of the reasons for and against a decision, and she had ended, in the false perspective of solitary meditation, by thinking solely in opposition to her heart. She had ceased to see anything but the force of the objections, the insurmountable difficulties, and she had taken her stand with the party most strongly opposed to her passionate desire. With that she had soothed herself with the chimerical hope of postponing from week to week the explanation which had suddenly forced itself upon her so imperatively. She came to it deeply moved and at the same time prepared, overwhelmed with surprise and, as it were, armored rather than armed with arguments long since thought out. She ran the risk thus of seeming very cold when she was deeply moved, very self-controlled and conventional, when she was all a-quiver. How near to weakness was her borrowed energy from the moment that she began her reply!

You have made me very unhappy, my friend,—for I shall continue to give you in my heart that name which you no longer care for. I do not reproach you. It was I who deceived myself, in thinking that your feeling for me might change, that it had changed. Perhaps such a transformation is not possible. I too have acted in good faith in wishing for it, in longing for it, in hoping for it. You know it, do you not?—Now that dream is at an end. She repeated, as if speaking to herself: At an end, at an end. And, turning toward Landri: How do you expect me to permit you to come here now, to indulge myself in those long conversations and that correspondence which were so dear to me, after you have talked to me in this way? One does not try such an experiment twice. Three years ago I was able to believe in an unconscious outbreak of your youth, in an exaltation which would soon subside. To-day, I am no longer able to flatter myself with that illusion. But on one point you are right. The circumstances are no longer the same. If at that time it was my right and my duty to judge severely a declaration which I should have been as culpable to listen to as you were to make it, how can I blame you now for a step in which there is no other feeling for me than respect and esteem? I have not lived much in the world,—enough, however, to realize that the fidelity of a heart like yours, prolonged thus and under such conditions, is no ordinary thing. It touches me far more than I can tell you.—Despite herself, her voice trembled as she let fall those words which signified too clearly: And I, too, love you.—But, she continued, firmly, this interview must be the last, since I cannot answer you with the words that you ask, since in that hand which you offer me I cannot place mine.

Then, he faltered, if I understand you, you refuse—

To be your wife. Yes, she said; and this time her blue eyes beneath their half-closed lids gazed steadfastly at Landri. Her delicate mouth closed in a fold of decision. Her whole fragile person was as if stiffened in a tension which proved to the lover the force of the emotion that she held in check. She repeated: "Yes, I refuse. I could find many pretexts to give you which, to others, would be good reasons, and which should be so to me. I have a child. I might say to you: 'I do not want him to have a stepfather.' That would not be true. You would be to him, I am sure, as you said, a second father. I might dwell upon my loss, which is so recent, in order to postpone my reply until later. Later, the reason which makes me decline the offer of your name would be the same, for it is just that name, it is what it represents, which forbids me to abandon myself to a liking of which you have had too many proofs. I shall soon be twenty-eight, my friend. I am no longer exactly a young woman. I have reflected much on marriage. I know that if people marry to love each other, they marry also to live and remain together, to have a home, to be a family. For that it is essential that there should not be, between the husband and wife, one of those unalterable differences of birth and environment, which make